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Culture and Consumption: A Theoretical
Account of the Structure and Movement of
the Cultural Meaning of Consumer Goods
GRANT McCRACKEN*
Cultural meaning in a consumer society moves ceaselessly from one location to
another. In the usual trajectory. cultural meaning moves first from the culturally
constituted world to consumer goods and then from these goods to the individual
consumer. Several instruments are responsible for this movement: advertising. the
fashion system. and four consumption rituals. This article analyzes the movement
of cultural meaning theoretically. showing both where cultural meaning is resident
in the contemporary North American consumer system and the means by which
this meaning is transferred from one location in this system to another.
C
a consumer good. Then the meaning is drawn from the
object and transferred to an individual consumer. In
other words, cultural meaning is located in three places:
the culturally constituted world, the consumer good,
and the individual consumer, and moves in a trajectory
at two points of transfer: world to good and good to
individual. The Figure summarizes this relationship. In
this article I propose to analyze this trajectory of meaning, taking each of its stages in turn.
Appreciating the mobile quality of cultural meaning
in a consumer society should help to illuminate two
aspects of consumption in modern society. First, such
a perspective encourages us to see consumers and consumer goods as the way-stations of meaning. In this
manner, we focus on structural and dynamic properties
of consumption that have not always been emphasized.
Second, the "trajectory" perspective asks us to see such
phenomena as advertising, the fashion world, and consumption rituals as instruments of meaning movement.
Weare encouraged to acknowledge the presence of a
large and powerful system at the heart of modern consumer society that gives this society some of its coherence and flexibility even as it serves as a constant source
of incoherence and discontinuity. In sum, this perspective can help to demonstrate some of the full complexity
of current consumption behavior and to reveal in a
more detailed way just what it is to be a "consumer
society. "
onsumer goods have a significance that goes beyond their utilitarian character and commercial
value. This significance rests largely in their ability to
carry and communicate cultural meaning (Douglas and
Isherwood 1978; Sahlins 1976). During the last decade,
a diverse body of scholars has made the cultural significance of consumer goods the focus of renewed academic study (Belk 1982; Bronner 1983; Felson 1976;
Furby 1978; Graumann 1974-1975; Hirschman 1980;
Holman 1980; Leiss 1983; Levy 1978; McCracken
1985c; Prown 1982; Quimby 1978; Rodman and Philibert 1985; Schlereth 1982; Solomon 1983). These
scholars have established a subfield extending across
the social sciences that now devotes itself with increasing
clarity and thoroughness to the study of "person-object"
relations. In this article, I propose to contribute a theoretical perspective to this emerging subfield by showing
that the meaning carried by goods has a mobile quality
for which prevailing theories make no allowance.
A great limitation of present approaches to the study
of the cultural meaning of consumer goods is the failure
to observe that this meaning is constantly in transit.
Cultural meaning flows continually between its several
locations in the social world, aided by the collective
and individual efforts of designers, producers, advertisers, and consumers. There is a traditional trajectory to
this movement. Usually, cultural meaning is drawn
from a culturally constituted world and transferred to
LOCATIONS OF CULTURAL
MEANING: THE CULTURALLY
CONSTITUTED WORLD
• Grant McCracken is Assistant Professor, Department of Consumer Studies, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada N I G
2W 1. The author thanks the following individuals for their contribution to the paper: Michael Ames, Duncan Joy, Mary Ellen RoachHiggins, K.O.L. Burridge, and the anonymous reviewers of this Journal.
The original location of the cultural meaning that
ultimately resides in consumer goods is the culturally
71
© JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH. Vol. 13. June 1986
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THE JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH
FIGURE
MOVEMENT OF MEANING
Culturally Constituted World
I
I
Advertising/Fashion
System
i
I
Possession
Ritual
+
KEY:
Fashion
System
Consumer Goods
I
Exchange
Ritual
~
I
Grooming
Ritual
~
+
I
Divestment
Ritual
~
Individual Consumer
CJ
Location of Meaning
-
Instrument of Meaning Transfer
constituted world. This is the world of everyday experience in which the phenomenal world presents itself
to the individual's senses fully shaped and constituted
by the beliefs and assumptions of his/her culture. Culture constitutes the phenomenal world in two ways.
First, culture is the "lens" through which the individual
views phenomena; as such, it determines how the phenomena will be apprehended and assimilated. Second,
culture is the "blueprint" of human activity, determining the co-ordinates of social action and productive activity, and specifying the behaviors and objects that issue
from both. As a lens, culture determines how the world
is seen. As a blueprint, it determines how the world will
be fashioned by human effort. In short, culture constitutes the world by supplying it with meaning. This
meaning can be characterized in terms of two concepts:
cultural categories and cultural principles.
Cultural Categories
Cultural categories are the fundamental coordinates
of meaning (McCracken 1985a), representing the basic
distinctions that a culture uses to divide up the phenomenal world. For instance, all cultures specify categories of time. In our culture these categories include
an elaborate system that can discriminate units as fine
as a "second" and as vast as a "millennium." Our culture also makes less precise but no less significant distinctions between leisure and work time, sacred and
profane time, and so on. Cultures also specify categories
of space. In our culture these categories include measurement and "occasion." Cultures also segment the
flora, fauna, and landscape of natural and supernatural
worlds into categories. Perhaps the most important cat-
egories are those that cultures create in the human
community-the distinctions of class, status, gender,
age, and occupation.
Cultural categories of time, space, nature, and person
make up the vast body of categories, creating a system
of distinctions that organizes the phenomenal world.
Each culture establishes its own special vision of the
world, thus rendering the understandings and rules appropriate to one cultural context preposterously inappropriate in another. A specific culture makes a privileged set of terms, within which virtually nothing appears alien or unintelligible to the individual member
of the culture and outside of which there is no order,
no system, no safe assumption, and no ready comprehension. In sum, by investing the world with its own
particular meaning, culture "constitutes" the world. It
is from a world so constituted that the meaning destined
for consumer goods is drawn.
Cultural Categories in Contemporary
North America
It is worth noting that cultural categories in present
day North America appear to have unique characteristics. First, they possess an indeterminacy that is not
normally evident in other ethnographic circumstances.
For instance, cultural categories of person are marked
by a persistent and striking lack of clarity, as are cultural
categories of age. Second, they possess an apparent
"elective" quality. Devoted as it is to the freedom of
the individual, contemporary North American society
permits its members to declare at their own discretion
the cultural categories they presently occupy. Exercising
this freedom, teenagers declare themselves adults,
members of the working class declare themselves middle
class, the old declare themselves young, and so on. Category membership, which in most cultures is more
strictly specified and policed, is in our own society much
more a matter of individual choice. In our culture, individuals are to a great extent what they claim to be,
even when these claims are, by some sober sociological
reckoning, implausible.
We must note a third characteristic of cultural categories in contemporary North America: they are subject to constant and rapid change. The dynamic quality
of present day North American cultural categories
plainly adds to their indeterminacy. More important,
however, this dynamism also makes our cultural categories subject to the manipulative efforts of the individual. Social groups can seek to change their place in
the categorical scheme, while marketers can seek to establish or encourage a new cultural category of person
(e.g., the teenager, the "yuppie") in order to create a
new market segment. Cultural categories in contemporary North America are subject to rethinking and
rearrangement by several parties.
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CULTURE AND CONSUMPTION
The Substantiation of Cultural Categories
Cultural categories are the conceptual grid of a culturally constituted world. They determine how this
world will be segmented into discrete, intelligible parcels
and how these parcels will be organized into a larger
coherent system. For all their importance, however,
cultural categories have no substantial presence in the
world they organize. They are the scaffolding on which
the world is hung and are therefore invisible. But cultural categories are constantly substantiated by human
practice. Acting in conformity with the blueprint of
culture, the members of a community are constantly
realizing categories in the world. Individuals continually
play out categorical distinctions, so that the world they
create is made consistent with the world they imagine.
In a sense, the members of a culture are constantly engaged in the construction-the constitution-of the
world they live in.
One of the most important ways in which cultural
categories are substantiated is through a culture's material objects. As we shall see in a moment, objects are
created according to a culture's blueprint and to this
extent, objects render the categories of this blueprint
material and substantial. Thus, objects contribute to
the construction of the culturally constituted world
precisely because they are a vital, tangible record of
cultural meaning that is otherwise intangible. Indeed,
it is not too much to say that objects have a "performative" function (Austin 1963; Tambiah 1977) insofar
as they give cultural meaning a concreteness for the
individual that it would not otherwise have. The cultural
meaning that has organized a world is made a visible,
demonstrable part of that world through goods.
The process by which a culture makes its cultural
categories manifest has been studied in some detail by
anthropologists. Structural anthropology has supplied
a theoretical scheme for this study, and several subspecialties, such as the anthropologies of art, clothing,
housing, and material culture, have supplied areas of
particular investigation. As a result of this work, there
is now a clear theoretical understanding of the way in
which linguistic and especially nonlinguistic media express cultural categories (Barthes 1967; deSaussure
1966; Levi-Strauss 1963, p. 116; Sahlins 1976). There
is also a wide range of empirical investigation into the
areas of spatial organization (Doxtater 1984), house
form (Bourdieu 1973; Cunningham 1973), art (Fernandez 1966; Greenberg 1975), clothing (Adams 1973;
McCracken 1986; Schwarz 1979), ornament (Drewal
1983), technology (Lechtman and Merrill 1977), and
food (Appadurai 1981; Douglas 1971; Ortner 1978).
This study of material culture has helped to show how
the world is furnished with material objects that reflect
and contribute to its cultural constitution-how cultural categories are substantiated.
The Substantiation of Cultural Categories
in Goods
Goods may be seen as an opportunity to express the
categorical scheme established by a culture. Goods are
an opportunity to make culture material. Like any other
species of material culture, goods allow individuals to
discriminate visually among culturally specified categories by encoding these categories in the form of a set
of material distinctions. Categories of person divided
into parcels of age, sex, class, and occupation can be
represented in a set of material distinctions by means
of goods. Categories of space, time, and occasion can
also be reflected in this medium of communication.
Goods help substantiate the order of culture.
Several studies have examined the way in which goods
serve in this substantiation. Sahlins' study (1976) of the
symbolism of North American consumer goods examines food and clothing "systems" and shows their
correspondence to cultural categories of person. Levy's
(1981) study of the correspondence between food types
and cultural categories of sex and age in American society is another excellent illustration of the way in which
one can approach the demographic information carried
in goods from a structuralist point of view. Both ofthese
studies demonstrate that the order of goods is modelled
on the order of culture. Both studies also demonstrate
that much of the meaning of goods can be traced back
to the categories into which a culture segments the
world. The substantiation of class categories by consumer goods has been considered by Belk, Mayer, and
Bahn (1981), Coleman (1983), Davis (1956), Form and
Stone (1957), Goffman (1951), Sommers (1963), Vershure, Magel, and Sadalla (1977), and Warner and Lunt
(1941). The substantiation of gender categories has been
less well examined but appears to be drawing more
scholarly attention (Allison et al. 1980; Belk 1982;
Hirschman 1984; Levy 1959). The substantiation of age
categories also appears to be receiving more attention
(Disman 1984; Olson 1985; Sherman and Newman
1977-1978; Unruh 1983).
Cultural Principles
Cultural meaning also consists of cultural principles.
In the case of principles, meaning resides in the ideas
or values that determine how cultural phenomena are
organized, evaluated, and construed. If cultural categories are the result of a culture's segmentation of the
world into discrete parcels, cultural principles are the
organizing ideas by which the segmentation is performed. Cultural principles are the charter assumptions
that allow all cultural phenomena to be distinguished,
ranked, and interrelated. As the orienting ideas for
thought and action, cultural principles find expression
in every aspect of social life, goods not least of all.
74
Cultural principles, like cultural categories, are substantiated by material culture in general and consumer
goods in particular. It is worth observing that cultural
categories and cultural principlt~s are mutually presupposing, and their expression in goods is necessarily simultaneous. Therefore, goods are incapable of signifying one without signifying the other. When goods
show a distinction between two cultural categories, they
do so by encoding something of the principle according
to which the two categories have been distinguished.
Thus, the clothing that distinguishes between men and
women or between high and low classes also reveals
something ofthe nature of the differences that are supposed to exist between these categories (McCracken
1985c). Clothing communicatl~s both the supposed
"delicacy" of women and "stre:ngth" of men or both
the supposed "refinement" of a higher class and "vulgarity" of a lower one. Appare:ntly, the categories of
class and sex are never communicated without this indication of how and why they are to be distinguished.
The world of goods, unlike that of language, never engages in a simple signalling of difference. In fact, goods
are always more forthcoming and more revealing. In
the world of goods, signs are always, in a sense, more
motivated and less arbitrary than in the world of language.
Cultural principles in contemporary North America
have the same indeterminate, changeable, elective
quality that cultural categories do. Such principles as
"naturalism" can fall into disrepute in one decade, only
to be rehabilitated and advanced to a new place of importance in another, as occurred in the 1960s. The
principle of "disharmony" that the punk aesthetic finds
so useful was once not a principle but merely the term
for phenomena that had somehow escaped the successful application of another principle. The ethnographic literature on the meaning of objects as principle
may be found in Adams (1973), Drewal (1983), Fernandez (1966), and McCracken (1982a). Substantive
literature that shows the presence and nature of the
meaning of objects as principle in contemporary North
American society is not abundant. Levy (1981) makes
passing reference to this question, as does Sahlins
(1976), and the idea is implicitly treated in the work of
Lohof (1969) on the meaning carried by the Marlboro
cigarette. The idea also surfaces in the attempt of sociologists to make objects an index of status and class.
For example, Laumann and House (1970) sought to
establish the meaning of household furniture and resorted to the principles of "mode:rn" and "traditional."
Felson in his study of "material life styles" (1976) posited something called a "bric-a-brac factor" while Davis
(1958) coined the term "Bauhaus Japanesey" to characterize a certain principle of interior design. The principle of "science" (or, more exactly, the concern for
technical mastery of nature and the confidence that human affairs can be benignly transformed through tech-
THE JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH
nological innovation) was a favorite motif of the kitchen
appliances and automobiles in 1950s and 1960s North
America (Csikszentimihalyi and Rochberg-Halton
1981, p. 52). Scholars in the material culture arm of
American studies and art history have made the most
notable contribution here (Quimby 1978; Schlereth
1982). Prown (1980) and Cohen (1982), for instance,
have examined the principles evident in American furniture.
It is plain in any case that, like cultural categories,
cultural principles are substantiated by consumer goods,
and these goods, so charged, help make up the culturally
constituted world. Both cultural categories and principles organize the phenomenal world and the efforts
of a community to manipulate this world. Goods substantiate both categories and principles and therefore
enter into the culturally constituted world as both the
object and objectification of this world. In short, goods
are both the creations and the creators of the culturally
constituted world.
INSTRUMENTS OF MEANING
TRANSFER: WORLD TO GOOD
Meaning first resides in the culturally constituted
world. To become resident in consumer goods, meaning
must be disengaged from this world and transferred to
goods. The present section proposes to examine two of
the institutions that are now used as instruments of
meaning transfer: advertising, and product design as
practiced in the fashion system.
Advertising
Advertising works as a potential method of meaning
transfer by bringing the consumer good and a representation of the culturally constituted world together
within the frame of a particular advertisement. The
creative director of an advertising agency seeks to conjoin these two elements in such a way that the viewer/
reader glimpses an essential similarity between them.
When this symbolic equivalence is successfully established, the viewer/reader attributes to the consumer
good certain properties s/he knows exist in the culturally
constituted world. The known properties of the culturally constituted world thus come to reside in the unknown properties ofthe consumer good and the transfer
of meaning from world to good is accomplished.
The mechanics of such a complicated process deserve
more detailed exposition. The creative director is concerned with effecting the successful conjunction of two
elements, one of which is specified by a client. In most
cases, the client gives the director a consumer good, the
physical properties and packaging of which are fixed
and not subject to manipulation. The second element,
CULTURE AND CONSUMPTION
the representation of the culturally constituted world,
is constrained and free in almost equal proportions. The
client, sometimes drawing on marketing research and
advice, will specify the properties being sought for the
consumer good. Armed with these specifications, the
creative director now enjoys a wide range of discretionary control. Subject only to the negative constraints of
budgetary limitations and the positive constraints of a
continuous brand image, the director is free to deliver
the desired symbolic properties in anyone of a nearly
infinite number of ways.
This delivery process consists of a lengthy and elaborate series of choices (Dyer 1982; McCracken 1984;
Sherry 1985; Williamson 1978). The first choice is a
difficult one. The director must identify with sufficient
clarity for his/her own purposes the properties that are
sought for the good in question. This procedure sometimes results in a period of complicated discourse between client and director where the parties alternately
lead and follow one another into a sharpened appreciation of the properties sought for the consumer good.
In any case, the advertising firm will enter into its own
consultative process in order to establish clarity sufficient for its own purposes. The second choice in the
delivery process is equally difficult but perhaps less
consultative. The director must decide where the properties desired for the ad reside in the culturally constituted world. The director has at his/her disposal a vast
array of possibilities from which to choose. Place must
be selected, and the first choice here is whether the ad
will have a fantasy setting or a naturalistic one. If the
latter is chosen, it must be decided whether it will be
an interior or an exterior setting, an urban or rural
landscape, or a cultivated or untamed environment.
Time of day and time of year must also be chosen. If
people are to appear in the advertisement, their sex,
age, class, status, and occupation must be selected and
their clothing and body postures and affective states
specified (Goffman 1979). These are the pieces of the
culturally constituted world that can be evoked in
the ad.
It must be noted that this selection process can be
performed more or less well, according to the skill and
training of the director. There is no simple route from
the desired properties for the consumer good to the
pieces of the culturally constituted world that can evoke
them in the advertisement. As members of the advertising profession point out, this is a creative process
where the most appropriate selections for the advertisement are not so much calculated as glimpsed. Imprecision and error in this creative process are not only
possible but legion. It must also be noted that the process
of selection, because it is creative, proceeds at unconscious as well as conscious levels. Directors are not always fully cognizant of how and why a selection is made,
even when this selection presents itself as compelling
and necessary (e.g., Arlen 1980, pp. 99, 119).
75
In sum, the director must choose from among alternatives that have been created by the network of cultural
categories and principles that constitute a culture's
world. The chosen alternatives will reflect those categories and principles that a director decides most closely
approximate the meaning that the client seeks for the
product. Once these two choice processes are complete,
a third set of choices must be made. The director must
decide just how the culturally constituted world is to
be portrayed in the advertisement. This process consists
of reviewing all of the objects that substantiate the selected meaning and then deciding which of these objects
will be used to evoke this meaning in the advertisement.
Finally, the director must decide how to present the
product in its highly contrived context. Photographic
and visual conventions will be exploited to give the
viewer/reader the opportunity to glimpse an essential
equivalence between the two elements of world and object. The director must bring these two elements into a
conjunction that encourages a metaphoric identification
of sameness by the would-be consumer. World and good
must seem to enjoy a special harmony-must be seen
to go together. When the viewer/reader glimpses this
sameness (after one or many exposures to the stimuli),
the process of transfer has taken place. Meaning has
shifted from the culturally constituted world to the
consumer good. This good now stands for a cultural
meaning of which it was previously innocent.
Visual images and verbal material appear to assume
a very particular relationship in this transfer process.
It is chiefly the visual aspect of an advertisement that
conjoins the world and the object when a meaning
transfer is sought. Verbal material serves chiefly as a
kind of prompt that instructs the viewer/reader in the
salient properties that are supposed to be expressed by
the visual part of the advertisement. Text (especially
headlines) makes explicit what is already implicit in the
image. Text provides instructions on how the visual
part of the advertisement is to be read. The verbal component allows the director to direct the viewer/reader's
attention to exactly those meaningful properties that
are intended for transfer (cf., Barthes 1983, pp. 33-39;
Dyer 1982, pp. 139-182; Garfinkle 1978; Moeran
1985).
All of this must now be successfully decoded by the
viewer/reader. It is worth emphasizing that the viewer/
reader is the final author in the process of transfer. The
director brings the world and the consumer good into
conjunction and then suggests their essential similarity.
It is left to the viewer/reader to see this similarity and
effect the transfer of meaningful properties. To this extent, the viewer/reader is an essential participant in the
process of meaning transfer, as Williamson (1978, pp.
40-70) notes. The viewer/reader must complete the
work of the director.
Advertising is a conduit through which meaning
constantly pours from the culturally constituted world
76
to consumer goods. Through advertising, old and new
goods continually give up old meanings and take on
new ones. As active participants in this process, the
viewer/reader is kept informed ofthe present state and
stock of cultural meaning that exists in consumer goods.
To this extent, advertising serves as a lexicon of current
cultural meanings. In large part, advertising maintains
a consistency between what Sahlins calls the "order of
culture" and the "order of goods" (1976, p. 178).
The Fashion System
The fashion system is less frequently observed, studied, and understood as an instrument of meaning
movement, yet this system also serves as a means by
which goods are systematically invested and divested
of meaningful properties. The fashion system is a
somewhat more complicated instrument for meaning
movement than advertising. In the case of advertising,
movement is accomplished by the efforts of an advertising agency to unhook meaning from a culturally
constituted world and transfer it to a consumer good
by means of an advertisement. In the case ofthe fashion
system, the process has more sources of meaning, agents
of transfer, and media of communication. Some of this
additional complexity can be captured by noting that
the fashion world works in three distinct ways to transfer
meaning to goods.
In one capacity, the fashion system performs a transfer of meaning from the culturally constituted world to
consumer goods that is remarkably similar in character
and effect to the transfer performed by advertising. The
same effort to conjoin aspects of the world and a consumer good is evident in magazines or newspapers, and
the same process of glimpsed similarity is sought after.
In this capacity, the fashion system takes new styles of
clothing or home furnishings and associates them with
established cultural categories and principles, moving
meaning from the culturally constituted world to the
consumer good. This is the simplest aspect of the
meaning-delivery capacity of the fashion system (and
ironically, the one that Barthes (1983) found so perplexing and difficult to render plain).
In a second capacity, the fashion system actually invents new cultural meanings in a modest way. This invention is undertaken by opinion leaders who help
shape and refine existing cultural meaning, encouraging
the reform of cultural categories and principles. These
are distant opinion leaders: individuals who by virtue
of birth, beauty, or accomplishment are held in high
esteem. These distant opinion leaders are sources of
meaning for individuals of lesser standing. In fact, it
has been suggested that the innovation of meaning is
prompted by the imitative appropriations of those of
low standing (McCracken 1985c; Simmel 1904). Classically, the high-standing individuals come from a conventional social elite: the upper classes. These classes,
THE JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH
for instance, originated the "preppie look" that has recently trickled down so widely and deeply. More recently, opinion leaders have come from a group of unashamedly nouveau riche characters who now dominate
television in evening soap operas such as "Dallas" and
"Dynasty" and who appear to have influenced the consumer and lifestyle habits of so many North Americans.
Motion picture and popular music stars, revered for
their status, their beauty, and sometimes their talent,
also form a relatively new group of opinion-leaders. All
ofthese new opinion leaders invent and deliver a species
of meaning that has been largely fashioned from the
prevailing cultural coordinates established by cultural
categories and cultural principles. These opinion leaders
are permeable to cultural innovations, changes in style,
value, and attitude, which they then pass along to the
subordinate parties who imitate them.
In a third capacity, the fashion system engages in the
radical reform of cultural meanings. Some part of the
cultural meaning of western industrial societies is always
subject to constant and thoroughgoing change. This
radical instability of meaning is due to the fact that
western societies are, in the language of Claude LeviStrauss (1966, pp. 233-234), "hot societies." Western
societies willingly accept, indeed encourage, the radical
changes that result from deliberate human effort and
the effect of anonymous social forces (Braudel 1973,
p. 323; Fox and Lears 1983; McCracken 1985d;
McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb 1982). As a result,
cultural meaning in a hot, western, industrial, complex
society is constantly undergoing systematic change. In
contradistinction to virtually all ethnographic precedent, members of such a society live in a world that
is deliberately and continually being transformed
(McCracken 1985b). Indeed, it is no exaggeration to
say that hot societies demand change and depend on it
to drive certain economic, social, and cultural sectors
in their world (cf., Barber and Lobel 1953; Fallers 1961).
The fashion system serves as one of the conduits to
capture and move highly innovative cultural meaning.
The groups responsible for the radical reform of cultural meaning are those existing at the margins of society, e.g., hippies, punks, or gays (Blumberg 1974; Field
1970; Meyersohn and Katz 1957). Such groups invent
a much more radical, innovative kind of cultural
meaning than their high-standing partners in meaningdiffusion leadership. Indeed, such innovative groups
represent a departure from the culturally constituted
conventions of contemporary North American society.
They illustrate the peculiarly western tendency to tolerate dramatic violations of cultural norms. These
groups redefined cultural categories, if only through the
negative process of violating such cultural categories as
age and status (hippies and punks), or gender (gays).
The redefined cultural categories and a number of attendant cultural principles have now entered the cultural mainstream. The innovative groups become
77
CULTURE AND CONSUMPTION
"meaning suppliers" even when they are devoted to
overturning the established order (e.g., hippies) or are
determined not to allow their cultural inventions to be
absorbed by the mainstream, (e.g., punks; cf., Hebdige
1979; Martin 1981).
If the sources of cultural meaning are dynamic and
numerous, so are the agents who gather up cultural
meaning and effect its transfer to consumer goods. In
the case of the fashion system, the agents form two main
categories: (I) product designers, and (2) fashion journalists and social observers. Product designers may
sometimes be the very conspicuous individuals who establish themselves as arbiters of clothing design in fashion centers such as Paris or Milan, and who surround
themselves with a cult of personality. Other product
designers, e.g., architects and interior designers, sometimes achieve a roughly comparable stature and exert
an equally international influence (Kron 1983). More
often, however, they are unknown outside their own
industries (Clark 1976; Meikle 1979; Pulos 1983). The
designers of Detroit automobiles are a case in point
here, as are the product developers in the furniture and
appliance industries. (Individuals such as Raymond
Loewy are exceptions that prove the rule.)
The second category of agents consists of fashion
journalists and social observers. Fashion journalists may
belong to the print or film media and may have a high
or a low profile. Social observers may be journalists
who study and document new social developmentse.g., Lisa Birnbach (1980), Kennedy Fraser (1981), Tom
Wolfe (1970), Peter York (1980), or they may be academics who have undertaken a roughly similar inquiry
from a somewhat different point of view-e.g., Roland
Barthes (1972), and Christopher Lasch (1979). Market
researchers are beginning to serve in this capacity as
well-e.g., John Naisbett (1982) Arnold Mitchell
(1983), and possibly, John Molloy (1977).
These groups share a relatively equal division oflabor.
Journalists perform their part of the enterprise by serving as gate keepers of a sort. They review aesthetic, social, and cultural innovations as these first appear and
then classify the innovations as either important or
trivial. In this respect, journalists resemble the gatekeepers in the art (Becker 1972) and music (Hirsch
1972) worlds. Journalists are supposed to observe as
best they can the whirling mass of cultural innovation
and decide what is ephemeral and what will endure.
After they have completed their difficult winnowing
process, journalists engage in a dissemination process
to make their decisions known. It must be admitted
that everyone in the diffusion chain (Rogers 1983) plays
a gatekeeping role and helps to influence the tastes of
individuals looking for opinion leadership. Journalists
are especially important because they make their influence felt even before an innovation passes to its "early
adopters" (Baumgarten 1975; Meyersohn and Katz
1957; Polegato and Wall 1980).
When journalists have identified genuine innovations, product designers begin the task of drawing
meaning into the mainstream and investing it in consumer goods. The product designer differs from the advertising agency director in that s/he transforms not
only the symbolic properties of a consumer good but
also its physical properties. Apart from fashion and
trade shows (which reach only some potential consumers), the product designer does not have a meaninggiving context such as the advertisement where s/he
can display the consumer good. Instead, the consumer
good will leave the designer's hands and enter any context the consumer chooses. Product design is the means
a designer has to convince the consumer that a specific
object possesses a certain cultural meaning. The object
must leave the designer's hands with its new symbolic
properties plainly displayed in its new physical properties.
The designer, like the agency director, depends on
the consumer to supply the final act of association and
effect the meaning transfer from world to object. But
unlike the agency director, the product designer does
not have at his/her disposal the highly managed, rhetorical circumstances of an advertisement to encourage
and direct this meaning transfer. The designer can not
inform the consumer of the qualities intended for the
object; these qualities must be self-evident in the object,
so the consumer can effect the meaning transfer for him/
herself. Therefore, it is necessary that the consumer
have access to the same sources of information about
new fashions in meaning that the designer has. The
journalist makes this information available to the consumer so that s/he can identify the cultural significance
of the physical properties of a new object. In short, the
designer relies on the journalist at the beginning and
then again at the very end of the meaning transfer process. The journalist supplies new meaning to the designer as well as to the recipient of the designer's work.
In this way, both advertising and the fashion system
are instruments for the transfer of meaning from the
culturally constituted world to consumer goods. They
are two of the means by which meaning is invested in
the object code. It is thanks to them that the objects of
our world carry such a richness, variety, and versatility
of meaning and can serve us so variously in acts of selfdefinition and social communication.
LOCATIONS OF CULTURAL
MEANING: CONSUMER GOODS
That consumer goods are the locus of cultural meaning is too well-established a fact to need elaborate demonstration here. This is what Sahlins has to say about
one product category-clothing (1976, p. 179):
Considered as a whole, the system of American clothing
amounts to a very complex scheme of cultural categories
78
THE JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH
and the relations between them, a veritable map-it does
not exaggerate to say-of the cultural universe.
What can be said of clothing can be said of virtually all
other high-involvement product categories and several
low-involvement ones. Clothing, transportation, food,
housing exteriors and interiors, and adornment all serve
as media for the expression of the cultural meaning that
constitutes our world.
That goods possess cultural meaning is sometimes
evident to the consumer and sometimes hidden. Consumers may consciously see and manipulate such cultural meanings as the status of a consumer item. Just
as often, however, individual consumers recognize the
cultural meaning carried by consumer goods only in
exceptional circumstances. For instance, consumers
who have lost goods because of burglary, sudden impoverishment, or the divestment that occurs with aging
evidence a profound sense of loss and even mourning
(Belk 1982, p. 185). The possession rituals about to be
discussed also suggest that the meaningful properties of
consumer goods are not always conspicuously evident
to a consumer, however much they serve to inform and
control his/her action.
It was observed at the beginning of this article that
the last decade has seen an outpouring of work on the
cultural significance of consumer goods. Indeed, the
wealth of this literature reassures us that the study of
the cultural meaning carried by goods is a flourishing
academic enterprise. None of this literature, however,
addresses the question of the mobile quality of cultural
meaning, and we may wish to make this question an
operative assumption in the field. When we examine
the cultural meaning of consumer goods, we may wish
to determine where cultural meaning came from and
how it was transferred.
INSTRUMENTS 014' MEANING
TRANSFER: GOOD TO CONSUMER
Thus far we have tracked the movement of cultural
meaning from the culturally constituted world to consumer goods and have considered the role of two instruments in this process. We must now address how
meaning, now resident in consumer goods, moves from
the consumer good into the lifc~ of the consumer. In
order to describe this process, a second set of instruments of meaning transfer must be discussed. These
instruments appear to qualify as special instances of
"symbolic action" or ritual (Munn 1973; Turner 1969).
Ritual is a kind of social action devoted to the manipulation of cultural meaning for purposes of collective
and individual communication and categorization.
Ritual is an opportunity to affirm., evoke, assign, or revise the conventional symbols and meanings of the cultural order. To this extent, ritual is a powerful and versatile tool for the manipulation of cultural meaning. In
the form of a classic rite of passage, ritual is used to
move an individual from one cultural category of person
to another, where s/he gives up one set of symbolic
properties, e.g., those of a child, and takes up another,
e.g., those of an adult (Turner 1967; Van Gennep 1960).
Other forms of ritual are devoted to different social ends.
Some forms are used to give "experiential reality" to
certain cultural principles and concepts (Tambiah
1977). Still other forms are used to create certain political contracts (McCracken 1982b). In short, ritual is
put to diverse ends in its manipulation of cultural
meaning. In contemporary North America, ritual is
used to transfer cultural meaning from goods to individuals. Four types of rituals are used to serve this purpose: exchange, possession, grooming, and divestment
rituals. Each of these rituals represents a different stage
in a more general process by which meaning is moved
from consumer good to individual consumer.
Exchange Rituals
In contemporary North American exchange ritualsespecially Christmas and birthday rituals-one party
chooses, purchases, and presents consumer goods to
another (Caplow 1982). This movement of goods is also
potentially a movement of meaningful properties. Often
the gift-giver chooses a gift because it possesses the
meaningful properties s/he wishes to see transferred to
the gift-receiver. Thus, the woman who receives a particular kind of dress is also made the recipient of a particular concept of herself as a woman (Schwartz 1967).
The dress contains this concept and the giver invites
the recipient to define herself in its terms. Similarly,
many of the continuous gifts that flow between parents
and children are motivated by precisely this notion. The
gifts to the child contain symbolic properties that the
parent would have the child absorb (Furby 1978, pp.
312-313).
The ritual of gift exchange establishes a potent means
of interpersonal influence. Gift exchange allows individuals to insinuate certain symbolic properties into
the lives of a gift recipient and to initiate possible
meaning transfer. In more general terms, consumers
acting as gift-givers are made agents of meaning transfer
to the extent that they selectively distribute goods with
specific properties to individuals who mayor may not
have chosen them otherwise. The study of gift exchange,
well established in the social sciences (Davis 1912;
Mauss 1970; McCracken 1983; Sahlins 1972), is already
underway in the field of consumer research (Belk 1979)
and deserves further study. Attention must be given to
the choice process used by a giver to identify the gift
with the cultural meanings s/he seeks to pass along to
the recipient. Attention must also be given to the significance of gift wrapping and presentation as well as
the context (time and place) in which gift presentations
are made. These aspects of the domestic ritual of gift
79
CULTURE AND CONSUMPTION
giving are vitally important to the meaningful properties
of the goods exchanged.
Possession Rituals
Consumers spend a good deal of time cleaning, discussing, comparing, reflecting, showing off, and even
photographing many of their possessions. Housewarming parties sometimes provide an opportunity for display, while the process of home "personalization"
(Hirschman 1982, pp. 37-38; Kron 1983; Rapoport
1968, 1982) especially serves as the occasion for much
comparison, reflection, and discussion. Though these
activities have an overt functionality, they all appear
to have the additional effect of allowing the consumer
to claim possession as his/her own. This claiming process is not a simple assertion of territoriality through
ownership. Claiming is also an attempt to draw from
the object the qualities that it has been given by the
marketing forces of the world of goods. This process is
most conspicuous when it fails to take place. For example, occasionally a consumer will claim that a possession-a car, house, article of clothing, or other
meaning-carrying good-"never really seemed to belong to me." There are certain goods that the consumer
never successfully claims because s/he never successfully claims their symbolic properties. The consumer
good becomes a paradox: the consumer owns it without
possessing it; its symbolic properties remain immovable.
Normally, however, the individual successfully deploys possession rituals and manages to extract the
meaningful properties that have been invested in the
consumer good. If the cultural meaning has been transferred, consumers are able to use goods as markers of
time, space, and occasion. Consumers draw on the ability of these goods to discriminate between such cultural
categories as class, status, gender, age, occupation, and
lifestyle. Since possession rituals allow the consumer to
take possession of the meaning of a consumer good,
these rituals help complete the second stage of the trajectory of the movement of cultural meaning. As we
have seen, advertising agencies and the fashion world
move cultural meaning from the culturally constituted
world into a consumer good. Using possession rituals,
individuals move cultural meaning out of their goods
and into their lives.
It is worth observing that possession rituals, especially
those devoted to personalizing the object, almost seem
to enact on a small scale, and for private purposes, the
activities of meaning transfer performed by the advertising agency. The act of personalizing is, in effect, an
attempt to transfer meaning from the individual's own
world to the newly obtained good. The new context in
this case is the individual's complement of consumer
goods, which has assumed a personal as well as public
meaning. Indeed, perhaps it is chiefly in this way that
an anonymous possession-manifestly the creation of
a distant, impersonal mass manufacturing process-is
turned into a personal possession that belongs to someone and speaks for them. Perhaps it is in this manner
that individuals create a personal world of goods that
reflects their own experience and concepts of self and
world. The meaning that advertising transfers to goods
is the meaning of the collectivity. The meaning that
personal gestures transfer to goods is the meaning of
the collectivity as this meaning has been inflected by
the particular experience of the individual consumer.
Grooming Rituals
It is clear that some of the cultural meaning drawn
from goods has a perishable nature. As a result, the
consumer must draw cultural meaning out of his/her
possessions on a repeated basis. When a continual process of meaning transfer from goods to consumer is
necessary, the consumer will likely resort to a grooming
ritual. The purpose of this ritual is to take the special
pains necessary to insure that the special, perishable
properties resident in certain clothes, hair styles, and
looks are, as it were, "coaxed" out of their resident goods
and made to live, however briefly and precariously, in
the life of the individual consumer. The "going out"
rituals with which one prepares for an evening out are
good examples of this process. These rituals illustrate
the time, patience, and anxiety with which an individual
will prepare him/herself for the special public scrutiny
of a gala evening or dinner party. Grooming rituals arm
individuals who are "going out" with the particularly
glamorous, exalted, meaningful properties that exist in
their "best" consumer goods. Once captured and made
resident in an individual, these meaningful properties
give him/her new powers of confidence, aggression, and
defense. The language with which advertisements describe certain make-up, hair-styling goods, and clothing
tacitly acknowledge the meaningful properties available
in goods that special grooming rituals release.
Sometimes, however, it is not the consumer but the
good that must be groomed. This occurs when the consumer cultivates the meaningful properties of an object
in the object rather than coaxing out the properties in
him/herself. The extraordinary amounts of largely redundant time and energy lavished on certain automobiles is perhaps the best case in point here (Myers 1985,
p. 562). This type of grooming ritual supercharges the
object so that it, in turn, may transfer special heightened
properties to an owner. Here again, the individual's role
in meaning investment is evident. The importance to
the consumer of cultivating consumer goods so that they
can release their meaningful qualities is most strikingly
highlighted by the behavior of aging individuals. Sherman and Newman report that the occupants of nursing
homes who regard themselves as being "at the end of
the line" engage in a process of "decathecting [removing
the emotional significance from] the significant objects
in their lives" (1977-1978, p. 188).
80
In the field of consumer research, the study of ritual
has been significantly advanced by Rook (1984), who
has observed how much consumption behavior is ritualized and who has noted the value of studying consumption from a ritual perspec:tive, and by Rook and
Levy (1982), who have examined grooming ritual and
grooming product symbolism. It is clear that grooming
rituals are one of the means by which individuals effect
a transfer of symbolic properties. In grooming rituals,
the meaning moves from consumer goods to the consumer. Grooming rituals help draw cultural meaning
out of these goods and invest it in the consumer.
Divestment Rituals
Individuals who draw meaning out of goods come to
view these meaning sources iIll personal terms, associating goods with their own personal properties. The
possible confusion between consumer and consumer
good encourages the use of the divestment ritual. Divestment rituals are employed for two purposes. When
the individual purchases a good that has been previously
owned, such as a house or a car, the ritual is used to
erase the meaning associated with the previous owner.
The cleaning and redecorating of a newly purchased
home, for instance, may be seen as an effort to remove
the meaning created by the previous owner. Divestment
allows the new owner to avoid contact with the meaningful properties of the previoUls owner and to free up
the meaning properties of the possession, claiming them
for him/herself. The second divestment ritual takes
place when the individual is about to dispense with a
good, either by giving it away or selling it. The consumer
will attempt to erase the meaning that has been invested
in the good by association. In moments of candor, individuals suggest that they feel "a little strange about
someone else wearing myoid cOIat." In moments of still
greater candor, they will confess that they fear the dispossession of personal meaning, a phenomenon that
resembles the "merging of identities" that sometimes
takes place between transplant donors and recipients
(Simmons, Klein, and Simmons 1977, p. 68). Both rituals suggest a concern that the meaning of goods can
be transferred, obscured, confused, or even lost when
goods change hands (Douglas 1966). Therefore, goods
must be emptied of meaning before being passed along
and cleared of meaning when taken on. What looks like
simple superstition is, in fact, an implicit acknowledgement of the moveable quality of the meaning with
which goods are invested.
In sum, personal rituals are variously used to transfer
the meaning contained in goods to individual consumers. Exchange rituals are used to direct goods charged
with certain meaningful properties to those individuals
the gift-giver supposes are needful of these properties.
In an exchange ritual, the giver invites the receiver to
partake of the properties ppssessed by the good. Possession rituals are practiced by an owner in order to
THE JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH
retrieve a good's meaningful properties. Possession rituals are designed to transfer a good's properties to its
owner. Grooming rituals are used to effect the continual
transfer of perishable properties-properties likely to
fade when possessed by the consumer. Grooming rituals
allow the consumer to "freshen" the properties s/he
draws from goods. These rituals can also be used to
maintain and "brighten" certain of the meaningful
properties resident in goods. Finally, divestment rituals
are used to empty goods of meaning so that meaningloss or meaning-contagion cannot take place. All of
these rituals are a kind of microcosmic version of the
instruments of meaning transfer that move meaning
from world to goods, since these rituals move meaning
from goods to consumer.
LOCATIONS OF CULTURAL
MEANING: INDIVIDUAL CONSUMERS
Cultural meaning is used to define and orient the
individual in ways that we are only beginning to appreciate. It is clear that individuals living in a contemporary Western industrial culture enjoy a wide range
of choice in the meaning they may draw from goods.
It was observed at the start of this article that contemporary North American culture leaves a great deal of
the individual undefined. One of the ways individuals
satisfy the freedom and fulfill responsibility of self-definition is through the systematic appropriation of the
meaningful properties of goods. Plainly this task is not
an easy one, nor is it always successful. Many individuals seek kinds of meaning from goods that do not exist
there. Others seek to appropriate kinds of meaning
to which they are not, by some sober sociological reckoning, entitled. Still others attempt to constitute their
lives only in terms of the meaning of goods. All of these
consumer pathologies are evident in modern consumption behavior and all of them illustrate how the process
of meaning transfer can go wrong, to the cost of the
individual and society. In normal situations, however,
the individual uses goods in an unproblematical manner
to constitute crucial parts of the self and the world. The
logic, imperatives, and details of this process of selfand world construction through goods are enormously
understudied and are only now attracting rigorous
study. Our culture has studied its own beliefs and practices with a thoroughness and enthusiasm unheralded
in the ethnographic record. With the same thoroughness
and enthusiasm it has also made material possessions
one of its most compelling preoccupations. It is therefore doubly odd and unfortunate that the study of the
use of goods in the construction of self and world should
have suffered such prolonged and profound neglect.
SUMMARY
Only recently has the field of "person-object" relations escaped the limitations imposed upon it by its
81
CULTURE AND CONSUMPTION
founding father, Thorstein Veblen. The field has begun
to recognize that the cultural meaning carried by consumer goods is enormously more various and complex
than the Veblenian insistence on status was capable of
recognizing. But now that the field has made this advance, it might consider the possibility of another. It
might begin to take account of the alienable, moveable,
manipulable quality of meaning. This article has sought
to encourage such a development by giving a theoretical
account of the structure and movement of the cultural
meaning of consumer goods. It has suggested that
meaning resides in three locations: the culturally constituted world, the consumer good, and the individual
consumer. Advertising, the fashion system, and consumer rituals have been identified as the means by which
meaning is drawn out of, and transferred between, these
locations. Advertising and the fashion system move
meaning from the culturally constituted world to consumer goods, while consumer rituals move meaning
from the consumer good to the consumer. This is the
trajectory of the movement of cultural meaning in
modern developed societies.
[Received May 1985. Revised December 1985.]
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